The Enron Story That Waited To Be Told (washingtonpost.com) "It's fair to say the press did not do a great job in covering Enron," says Steve Shepard, editor-in-chief of Business Week magazine, which ran only briefs on the company's financial problems until a cover story in November. "Enron was really a systemic failure of all the checks and balances we have on corporate governance: integrity of management, board of directors, audit committee of the board, outside accounting firm, Wall Street analysts and ultimately the press. And all of us failed."

UNDERSTANDING THE ENRON OUTRAGE
The first thing we need to do is remember Michael Kinsley's Reagan era mantra, the scandal is not what illegal actions were taken, the scandal is the obvious wrongdoing that was perfectly legal. (I paraphrase.) The media and congressional investigators (with the Shrubbers' encouragement) will focus on what did the administration or the accountants know and when did they know it, when the real scandal is the degree of power this one company was able to amass -- getting whole new markets created through favorable government action -- and how little there was to stop or even impede them from raiding the company and raping their employees, investors, and the general public in the process. The scandal is how few people in politics or business, now or while it was happening, are even willing to criticize these injustices or do anything to prevent them.

An astute but overly jovial Miami Herald column (Miami Herald: Enron falls -- with a whimper) asks: "Where have all the conspiracy theorists gone?" The columnist seems to get (just barely) the basically reactionary nature of modern conspiracism, something that gets obscured in the Hollywood image of the left-leaning post-hippie conspiracy buster, a la Oliver Stone and "The Lone Gunmen" of X-Files fame. In the real world (as opposed to the Hollywood imagination), most of the paranoid flack we got to know so well in the 90s was thrown out by the right wing, much of it quite cynically. Did Rush, Jerry et al ever really believe that Vince Foster was murdered and such, or did that just fit the silly thriller plot they were trying to spin out for their gullible audience of angry white guys and Christian fundamentalists? You be the judge. We should also not be surprised that something really massive like Enron does not get them going, any more than the election by Supreme Court did in 2000. These particular conspiracy theorists were never interested in exposing the hidden power centers in our society -- heck, they have lunch there every other day; they are interested in using the conspiracy trope to demonize anyone who might stand in the way of their reactionary political agenda. They are about promoting corporate power, not fighting it.

Why can't reporters ever seem to make distinctions? A piece in today's "Times" retails the idea that the Enron mess should be understood as the "reawakening" of the Washington scandal machinery, and then tries to proceed on the assumption that the current situation is somehow analogous to the various Clinton accusations:
A Familiar Capital Script . "The capital may once again face months, if not years, of yet another investigation of the White House featuring the volatile mix of money, influence, access and politics."
"Elements of a classic political scandal are here: A Texas corporation, led by Mr. Bush's most generous campaign contributor, files the largest bankruptcy petition in American history. A handful of executives are able to sell $1 billion worth of the company's stock before its collapse, but thousands of employees are barred from selling, losing their life's savings and retirement accounts."
Does anyone at the paper check over these stories for logic? How is there any equivalency between destroying the lives of thousands and anything Clinton was ever to supposed to have done? How can inviting contributors to White House parties and sleepovers be compared to contributors be allowed full access to and granted tremendous influence over policy-making? Frankly, it all looks makes a night in the Lincoln Bedroom look like a fairly innocuous perk for contributors, the illusion of access and influence, rather than the very real thing that Enron had for years wherever Bush was in control.

ENRON: When partisanship becomes a dutyWhite House Moves to Contain Political Damage From Enron Turmoil "'It's appropriate to take a look at what led to the bankruptcy of Enron,' " Mr. Fleischer said. He expressed the hope that any Congressional inquiry would be even-handled, not a 'partisan, politically charged investigation' of the kind that he said had so soured many Americans on Washington." It is going to be a stern test of the country's democratic instincts to see whether or not the Republicans are going to be allowed to get away with arguments like this. Certainly it is true that that scandal-driven politics turns the public off -- that's Bill Clinton got re-elected and stayed popular despite the most sustained campaign of scandal politics ever mounted against any administration. But those scandals were so different, involving personal morality and personal finances, on a very petty level. How will we respond to something as massive, and as steeped in systemic corruption, as Enron? In which the executives of one corporation used its close political ties to the state and national Bush administrations to get major government policies redone for its benefit, and then walked off with millions of their stockholders' money while in effect taking billions more from their stockholders, employees, and taxpayers who will inevitably have to pay to repair some of the damage? It is not mere partisanship but the democratic duty of the administration's political opponents to see that such a crime is full investigated and that justice is done -- partisanhip in the best sense of applying the kind of outside pressure and criticism that only can keep the powerful relatively truthful and honest.

P.S. I am guessing that the Republicans are now thanking their lucky stars that the Indepedent Counsel law has lapsed. If Ken Starr could keep busy on the slim pickings he had all those years, Enron could keep a firmament of Starrs busy for decades.

Books for Political Conservatives Top Best-Seller Lists "Can best-seller lists indicate the country's political leaning?" A New York Times writer thumbsucks a bit over the fact that the Times best-seller list is currently dominated by overtly right-wing books. One can only marvel at the way that the media, and especially the Times these days, fail to grasp the implications of basic demographic facts. Who has the money to throw at brand-new hardcover books, especially during a recession? The wealthier segments of the population, perhaps, especially those who have not been hurt much by the recent economic travails, or maybe even benefitted from upper-income skewed tax cuts and such? What segments of the population have always voted Republican (and usually conservative)? The same, and we may add here two other conservative-leaning groups that have the best access to the mega-bookstores and airport shops where NYTimes best-sellers are sold: suburbanites and businesspeople. I am going to look up how often (or how long ago) liberal or radical books have made the best-seller charts, if they have at all. I am guessing that nonfiction best-sellers have always skewed conservative, only more typically in the form of get-right-with-capitalism business and self-help books. And best-sellers say nothing about public opinion if that term is to be given even a moderately democratic definition. The article linked above says that the number one best-seller this week, Bernard Goldberg's "Bias," has 225,000 copies in print, but a tiny drop in a nation of 285 million people.

SENIORITIS
Also published at "Publick Occurrences Extra" because of the recent outage.
Two Senior Al Qaeda Fighters Captured : This is a headline from today's "New York Times." Like much of the formulaic language that journalists use, the phrase "senior fighter" is more interesting than illuminating. "Fighter" has emerged as the term of choice for the individual combatants that the U.S. has faced in most of the "rogue nation" interventions of the past decade or so. It bespeaks the conceptual difficulties that U.S. journalists and policymakers find themselves in when faced with the vast gulfs that exist between our nation and many others in the world, in terms of both wealth and what used to be called "political development." Basically many of the institutional methods of operation that have been developed in the European world either do not exist or have been artifically and weakly imposed over non-institutional political and social networks that determine how people in these societies actually live and think. War as we know it, something conducted by professional armies and kept separate from normal political and social alignments, is an institutional solution. So are constitutional governments.

We know these things exist weakly or not at all in places like Afghanistan and Somalia, but we still it almost impossible to think or write about them without our usual institutional concepts and categories. The term "soldier" is reserved for uniformed members of professional armies, people who fight as part of an institution in the service of some state and political ideology that we can recognize as legitimate and reasonable. "Warrior" would be a closer to the mark, but that carries all sorts of good connotations (such as honor and courage) that cannot be associated with people already labeled as cowardly terrorists or who are known to employ such tactics as robbery or the in-person killing of non-combatants. So the weirdly generic "fighter" has come to fit the bill.

Yet if "fighter" seems to recognize the social, non-institutional character of war in these places, "senior fighter" reveals how deep the conceptual and semantic confusion still is. Here we are fighting this now completely stateless and always only loosely instutionalized enemy ("declaring war on a noun," I believe Molly Ivins has called it); both the government and media have had the put the enemy through a punishing course of rhetorical solidification, talking about Al Qaeda as though it were a multinational corporation and its influential men like congressional aides. "Senior" fighters must be higher on the organizational chart, like divisional vice presidents or associate deans!

I'm back! In a random Washington Post story on Internet security, I came across this incredibly wrong-headed but rather typical contextualizing observation: "For much of its life, the Internet has been seen as a great democratizing force, a place where nobody needs know who or where you are." I do not deny that this is one of the ways the Internet "has been seen" (not the disppearing subject --- what the writer means is, this is what the media has said), but one never ceases to be amazed at the things that mistaken for democracy. Shouldn't it be "great atomizing force"? Since when did anonymity and bodilessness become the keys to democracy? Or has democracy stopped being about bringing individuals together and making their collective voice into something that will be not only heard but heeded? Does democracy have nothing to do with politics anymore?